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March 9, 2008

No Excuse For This

I enjoyed Robert Lipsyte's sportswriting when he was with the New York Times -- his coverage of Billy Bean's public acknowledgement of his homosexuality in 1999 was superb -- but this sentence from Lipsyte's recent column on Roger Clemens has made me far more annoyed that it should:

When the Red Sox traded him to Toronto in 1996, the Boston general manager said he was "in the twilight of his career."

I've gone on and on (and on!) in the past explaining how Dan Duquette never said Clemens was in the twilight of his career, so we'll overlook that one this time.

And Moss ties it on a sac fly in the ninth! 0-0 through 7.5 before Mets score in bottom 8 and we score in top 9. Lester and Santana both went 4 scoreless. Am I the only one who follows ST games?? Where is everybody? Oh right. At work.

No excuse is right. The competence of the entire journalistic establishment has declined past the vanishing point in the last decade, but well-beneath it are sportswriters and sportscasters, who no longer care about checking their facts, knowing their game, or even applying a modicum of control over the crap they write or say. Gary Thorne, that idiot Rob Dibble, Murray Chass, Dan S. even comparatively smart sportswriters like Tom Boswell seem to base their work on the presumption that their readers are complete twits and thus won't notice their sloppy thinking and fact-checking. I heard Holden Kushner the other day, on XM, talk about the Blue Jays from Florida, saying, "After all, didn't they finish in 2nd, ahead of the Yankees last year?" No, you boob---the Yankees made the play-offs last year---maybe you missed all that stuff that made Joe Torre leave? The bug game? HELLO? You're thinking about 2006, when the Jays finished ahead of the RED SOX. But, hey, it's only your full-time JOB...why should we expect you to keep teams and seasons straight?